The Corps Galactica, the Galaxy's police force, had pledged itself to a policy of non-interference with the backward Zarathustra Refugee Planets. Langenschmidt, the Corps chief on the planet Cyclops, was content with this ruling. After all, if the refugee planets could form their own civilizations from scratch, logically they would come up with cultures suited to their own needs. However, when the case of Justin Kolb came to his attention, Langenschmidt was forced to rethink the problem. Kolb's accident with the wolfshark revealed to the Corps' medicos the leg-graft that had been performed on him. It was a perfect match - only its gene-pattern wasn't Cyclopean, and limb-grafting wasn't practised on Cyclops. Where had the leg come from, who had been the unknown repairmen, and wasn't this something that might be violating galactic law? (First published 1965)
Release date:
September 29, 2011
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
159
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THE SKY rang with the reverberation of the fierce white sunlight like the interior of a blue drum. Wind hot as the breath of a furnace
teased the silver ocean into ripples, and the ripples shattered the sun’s image into a blazing pathway of diamond fragments.
Itching with sweat, aching with tension, Justin Kolb had to narrow his eyes even behind his wholeface visor because the response-limit
of the glass was exceeded if he turned his head towards that glistening track over the water and the opacity curve took a
sudden dive towards complete blankness.
Maddeningly, it was to sunward that he had caught the first wing-glints.
He had expected that the sight of the Jackson’s buzzards would crystallize his formless tension into the old familiar excitement, re-unite mind and body into the efficient combination, as much weapon as person, which was Justin Kolb at peak
operational efficiency. He had been trying for so long to get away on his own like this, on the hunter’s trail which now had
to make do for his old, preferred pastimes, that the strain of habituation to waiting had soured his keen anticipation of
the chase.
Only till I see the buzzards, he had promised himself. And then—
But he’d seen the buzzards at last, when he had half decided he was too far north even at this season, two days past midsummer,
and the instant of thrill had been—an instant. Now he was back in the slough of dreary awareness which had plagued him the
whole of yesterday and the whole of the day before. He was conscious of suffocating heat, of blinding brightness, of prickling
perspiration, of cramp from keeping the skimmer level and aligned despite the tug of the waves. His hands were slippery on
the controls, and the hard butt of his harpoon-gun seemed to take up twice as much room on the skimmer’s deck as it usually
did.
Briefly, he shut his eyes, wishing with all his force that somehow time could turn back and he could be free to return to
space.
But Cyclops was a relatively poor world. It could not support luxury spaceflight. Out there, a man had to be productive—mining
asteroids, servicing solar power relays, doing some clock-around job with the absolute concentration of machinery.
What the hell am I now? A gigolo.
The thought passed. True or not, he was at least able to indulge this much of his thirst for excitement and challenge; if
he had taken any other of the courses open to him, he would have been drudging away this glorious summer in a city or on a
farm or in some squalid fishing-port, pestered continually by the demands of other people, by the need to stack up work-credits, by holes in his shoes or leaks in his roof.
Even her high-and-mightiness is preferable to that…
He blinked. The wing-glints had come again, and this time remained in view instead of vanishing into the blur of heat-haze
and shimmery reflection along the skyline. His pulse beat faster as he began to count: five, six—eight, ten, at least a dozen
and possibly more.
Name of the cosmos, but it must be a giant!
For one moment, uncharacteristic alarm filled him. He had come deliberately to this northern extreme of the wolfsharks’ range,
because those that beat a path of slaughter more than a hundred miles from the equatorial shallows which were their customary
habitat were certain to be the largest and greediest specimens, and after his long impatient chafing in Frecity he had felt
nothing less than a monster would compensate him.
But seeing a dozen or more buzzards hovering was a shock.
It was perhaps the most characteristic sight on Cyclops: Jackson’s buzzards, swift, cruel-taloned, steely-winged, on the track
of a wolfshark, which killed for savage delight and not for hunger, so that even the monstrous appetites of the birds were
easily glutted by its gore-leaking victims. At this time of year, nearer the equator, one could look out over the sea and
espy as many as five or six groups of the carrion-eaters following the blood-smeared killers, for the ocean teemed with life.
Yet it was rare to see more than six buzzards to every wolfshark. By twos and threes, they would sate themselves and flap heavily away, while others took their
place, the total number in the sky remaining roughly constant. And there were reasons why those that roamed furthest north
were followed usually only by two or three buzzards: first, the sea offered fewer victims and hence less carrion; second,
the birds were still feeding their young at this time of year, and could not wander too far from their breeding-mats, the vast raft-like assemblies of Cyclops kelp which occurred only in a
narrow belt around the planet’s center.
Nonetheless, here it was: a wolfshark so big, so fast, and so murderous that a hundred miles away from home it was killing in quantities great enough to tip the balance in the buzzards’
dim minds on the side of greed rather than loyalty to their offspring.
He pursed his lips and eased his harpoon-gun closer to the firing-notch cut in the forward gunwale of the skimmer. Would one
shot do the job? Would it be better to load first with an unlined harpoon, to weaken the killer, before risking a shot with
one attached and the consequent danger of being dragged to the bottom? Had this enormous beast been attacked and escaped before—if
it had, how many times? The more often, the warier it would be of an approaching skimmer and the more likely it would be to
attack even if there was easy prey closer to hand.
He weighed the possibilities with half his mind, while with the other half he reviewed the area where he found himself.
This was the water-hemisphere of Cyclops, insofar as the differentiation was meaningful. It was a shallow-sea planet—its
moon being rather small, and incapable of raising large tides either in the crustal material or in the oceans, although its
sun exerted considerable tidal influence.
The shallowness of the sea, combined with a total volume of water close to the average for Class A planets (those on which
human beings could survive, eating some of the vegetation and at least a few of the native animals) meant that the dry-land
area was chopped up into small sections. The other half of the planet boasted some quite sizable islands, and even a quasi-continent
consisting of a score of large islands linked by isthmuses. This side was sparsely inhabited, and the largest island within
hundreds of miles was officially not even part of Cyclops, but a repair and recreation base for the Corps Galactica.
A certain amount of fishing; a certain amount of scrap-reclamation; some terrafarms on islands isolated enough to be worth
maintaining as pure-human ecological units against the risk of drifting seeds and wandering fauna from the Cyclops-normal
islands around them—that was the sum of human engagement with this hemisphere, apart from solar and tidal power installations
operating with a minimum of manned supervision.
Kolb hesitated. Then he gave a harsh laugh. Was he going to let the risk of dying alone and far from rescue prevent him from
going after this record-breaking wolfshark? He would never be able to face his image in the mirror again!
In any case, out in space he had faced death not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of miles from his fellow men.
His mind darkened briefly. He never cared to recall the circumstances that had brought him back from space to a planet-bound
existence, and forbidden him to combine his lust for danger with valuable work. There was nothing of value to anyone but himself
in this single-handed hunting; men had shared Cyclops with wolfsharks for long enough to determine the limits within which
they could be a nuisance, and if the necessity arose, the species was culled efficiently and with precision by teams of men
working from the air.
In fact, thought Kolb grayly, there’s damned little value to anybody in anything I’ve done with my life lately. Least of all to me …
Slowly, as the wing-glints came closer, following a line that would pass him within some four or five miles and if extended
would eventaully approach the island where the Corps Galactica maintained the repair base, a kind of muted exultation filled
him. He could see now that the buzzards were too full already to make more than token swoops on what the wolfshark killed,
yet—as though admiring the energy of the beast—they none of them made to flap back to the south and their breeding-mats.
It’ll break all the records. I never even heard of such a giant!
He put aside the unlined harpoon which his hand had automatically sought for the first shot. With fingers as exact as a surgeon’s,
he loaded a harpoon with line attached, and laid the gun in its firing notch.
Then he closed his left hand on the control levers, and without a tremor fed power to the reactor.
The skimmer leapt up on its planes with a shriek loud enough to startle a wolfshark at twice this range, and instantly the
wheeling buzzards disgorged the last food they had eaten and climbed a safe hundred feet into the sky. Just audible over the
thrum of power from his craft, Kolb heard their whickering cries, like the neighing of frightened horses.
And one of his questions was answered, anyway. This wolfshark had been attacked before, often enough to recognize a skimmer
for the danger it represented. It forgot its business of stitching a line of destruction across the peaceful ocean, and spun
around in the water to confront the fragile boat. It lowered its tail and spread its fans, and its head rose to the surface.
Kolb’s self-possession wavered, so that he had to cling desperately to his unverbalized decision: it doesn’t matter if I die or not! Thinking of it as huge, and seeing how huge it was, were two different things.
How big, then? Fifty feet from fan-tip to fan-tip, oscillating in the water like a manta ray, but having a tapered body which
was all keel for the muscles driving those fans, perfectly streamlined; a mere twitch, a single shrug of those muscles would
hurl it torpedo-swift on anything else which swam the waters of Cyclops, and jaws which could open to engulf a man would clamp
serrated rows of fangs into, and through, the victim. The bite killed, and the killer forgot. In summer, it was never hungry. It swallowed what its jaws held, and that sufficed until the next kill, minutes later.
Kolb silenced the yammering alarms in his mind and lined up the sights of his gun, rock-steady on the center of the maw.
And then, with the distance closing to two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty, there came the boom.
It rocked the skimmer. It startled the wolfshark. It was the noise of a Corps Galactica spacecraft braking at the edge of
atmosphere to put down at the repair base.
By a reflex not even the danger of death could overrule, ex-spaceman Justin Kolb glanced up, and the sun shone full on his
wholeface visor, triggering and overloading the glare response, so, that he was blind. He cried out, his hand closing on the
trigger of his gun. The harpoon whistled wide of a target, and the wolfshark charged.
DURING THE flight Maddalena Santos had mostly sat staring at nothing, turning over and over in her mind the decision which now confronted
her: to stay on, or not, in the Patrol Service.
Three other passengers were aboard—personnel from an airless Corps base further out towards the limits of the explored galaxy,
on rotating local leave and very excited about it. Two of them were men. The fact that these men looked at her once only told
her something about the effect of the last twenty years on her appearance.
It was one thing to know that she was assured of another two centuries of life. It was another to realize on this first visit
to civilization in so long a time how deep the impact of two decades on a barbarian world had gone.
She was assured of her longevity by the Patrol’s payscale; in a galaxy where the older worlds were so rich it literally made
no difference whether a given individual worked or not, it required either accidental dedication or a tempting bait to enlist
volunteers for the necessary drudgery of governmental service.
Not that you can really call it government, Maddalena reminded herself listlessly. It’s more like herding cattle. And lazy cattle, at that.
The other branches of government service paid at lower rates; only the Patrol paid ten-for-one in the unique currency of life.
She had served twenty years as an on-planet agent, among stinking barbarians lost in a mud-wallow, and she was entitled—if. . .
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